Microsoft Pushes the Cloud

A Microsoft executive stumped for the company's shifting strategy to the cloud. Microsoft is no longer positioning itself as a company that offers a choice of either software or hosted services but rather as a leader in the cloud, NASDAQ reports.

Microsoft COO Kevin Turner said:

We are going to lead with the cloud. It helps position Microsoft to sell more on-premise products.

The COO boasted about Microsoft's cloud portfolio, says ZDNet. Turner also took the time to take a few shots at Microsoft's competitors and angle for the attention of Wall Street.

When you think about the competitive landscape, the industry really talks about it in three ways. They talk about it as software as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service. When we think about how that software gets used and provisioned it's really around global providers, service providers and partners and the customer, private clouds. When you think where we're at, when you think about let's talking about Google and sales force for a second. They certainly target software as a service and they dabble some in as platform as a service. But their capabilities are far short of what we're doing from an Azure perspective. When you think about Amazon. Amazon clearly is an infrastructure as a service. But it only provides a limited set of platform as a service capability and virtual machines you manage with Amazon that you maintain and update. Not a whole broad platform as a service, and there's no partner and no host or story with Amazon. When you think about VMware. VMware really is a virtualization provider. Their definition of cloud is they virtualize cloud. And the platform services that they talk about are very disconnected from the underlying infrastructure.

In fact, one of the big advantages that we have of versus VMware they don't run their own data centers. They're not getting the knowledge associated with what it takes to run a world-class global service that we get with Windows Azure and we can then transfer those learnings to the service provider, our partners and directly on to our customers. That's the strategic opportunity we have.

So when you look at where Microsoft is playing across that breadth of offerings, the depth of what we're providing, clearly the sweet spot we have for this company in the most profitable area of this company is right in the heart of providing this IT as a service for our customers.